SAN JOSE - The funny thing about a winning streak is that, at the end of the day, the only thing that gets remembered is the win. But when a team loses, the performance tends to get picked apart.
But as the Sharks pointed out after the Edmonton Oilers snapped the team's six-game winning streak, San Jose consistently has had things to work on. Tuesday's loss showed they can't take advantage of a streak -- there's still a lot of work to do.
"I think it's a wakeup call for us right now," captain Logan Couture said. "You win six in a row and winning kind of masks when you're not playing your best if you find a way to win. I think the last couple of games that's the way the games have gone. We haven't played our game and we found a way to win, but tonight we got what we deserved."
This isn't to say that the Sharks didn't deserve to win any of the games during their last streak. Heck, their 2-1 shootout win over the Nashville Predators two weekends ago was easily the team's best game of the season. But through some of the other games during that stretch, a particular player or play is what kept them in the fight even when the opposition tried to make a comeback.
After going into a 2-0 hole against the Oilers on Tuesday, those different ways to win weren't coming into play.
"In the last couple of games here that we were winning, we were finding ways to win all over the map," Brenden Dillon discussed. "Sometimes, we thought we deserved to win. Other nights we found a way whether we were good on special teams or we got some big saves from Jones, whatever it might have been."
Sports
It didn't help that the Oilers came for revenge after the Sharks defeated them 6-3 exactly one week before. Not only did Edmonton get scoring from throughout their forward lines, but Mikko Koskinen was on his A-game between the pipes.
"We knew after we beat them last week they were going to come hard today," Dillon said. "We were expecting a push from them. But it just seemed like they elevated their game and we kind of stayed the same.."
Head coach Peter DeBoer agreed. "I thought they came out heavier and harder than last time," he said of Edmonton. "So they obviously wanted to fix what went wrong last time for them. I thought they were much more engaged all night."
[RELATED: What we learned in Sharks' streak-snapping loss to Oilers]
Perhaps the Sharks should take a page out of the Oilers' book and rebound from a loss in their upcoming contest. The loss to Edmonton comes as San Jose gears up to face the Golden Knights for the first time since the Vegas squad put them in a 0-2-0 hole to start the season.
If there is a time for the Sharks to rebound from a loss and get back to finding those different ways of winning, that time is now.
"We'd better play a lot better than we did tonight," Couture said, looking to the next game. "Or it could get ugly."
